ConocoPhillips joins climate group

[wordsmythe]

Kansas.com | 04/11/2007 | ConocoPhillips joins climate group

By JOHN PORRETTO
AP Business Writer
HOUSTON - ConocoPhillips has joined several other major corporations urging Congress to require limits on greenhouse gases tied to global warming, the first major U.S. oil company to take such a stance.

The company said Wednesday it has joined the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an alliance of big business and environmental groups that in January sent a letter to President Bush stating that mandatory emissions caps are needed to reduce the flow of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.

Other companies that belong to the partnership include London-based oil major BP PLC and the U.S. industrial products and media conglomerate General Electric Co.

"We recognize that human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels, is contributing to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that can lead to adverse changes in global climate," said Jim Mulva, ConocoPhillips' chairman and chief executive.

Mulva said the company was allocating "significantly more resources" to help develop alternative and renewable sources of energy and was committed to reducing emissions at its own plants. ConocoPhillips has said it will spend $150 million this year on the research and development of new energy sources and technologies - a 50 percent increase in spending from 2006.

Mulva said the company has followed the climate change debate for several years, though the call for mandatory limits on greenhouse gases is an abrupt departure from his views on the issue as recently as January.

In an interview at the time, Mulva acknowledged that all types of efficient energy sources were needed, but said market forces and consumer preferences, not federal mandates, should determine how they're used.

"We believe very strongly the best way of meeting those metrics is to determine what they are and then let the industry ... come up with the resources and plans to meet those, (rather) than have mandates saying specifically, 'You have to do it this way and that," he said at the time.

Now, he says ConocoPhillips believes a "mandatory national framework" is the most likely way to achieve meaningful impact on global greenhouse gas emissions, though he said it was too soon to say what type of caps should be imposed.

He said much of ConocoPhillips' focus was on finding ways to produce ethanol, an alternative already in use, and renewable diesel fuel more efficiently.

Mulva said the company was building the potential long-term costs of reducing emissions into its capital spending plans for each of its global projects and was developing internal targets for carbon emissions at its operations.

To that end, ConocoPhillips has committed to improving energy efficiency at its U.S. refineries by 10 percent by 2012.

In January, the CEOs of 10 major corporations, as part of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, said in their letter to Bush that the cornerstone of climate policy should be an economy-wide emissions cap-and-trade system.

Members of the group included chief executives of Alcoa Inc., DuPont Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Duke Energy Corp. The executives said mandatory reductions of heat-trapping emissions can be imposed without economic harm and would lead to economic opportunities if done across the economy and with provisions to mitigate costs.

Many of the companies already have voluntarily moved to curb greenhouse emissions, they said. But the executives noted they don't believe voluntary efforts will suffice.

[Bubba]

Too bad that CO2 doesn't cause increased temperature. It is the increased temperatures that causes a rise in CO2. The facts are out there, just a little hard to find because of all the big money involved in the current global warming retoric. The rising CO2 actually lags the rising temps.

[Made in the USA]

Originally Posted by Bubba

Too bad that CO2 doesn't cause increased temperature. It is the increased temperatures that causes a rise in CO2. The facts are out there, just a little hard to find because of all the big money involved in the current global warming retoric. The rising CO2 actually lags the rising temps.

Explain your reasoning, Bubba??

[Highwayman]

Common sense tells us that any big corporation isn’t going to endorse something unless they have figured out how to profit from it. So how does big oil profit from promoting a shift away from fossil fuels? Instead of fighting the global warming tide as warming supporters claim big oil figured out how profit from it. Enron was working on this 10 years ago with the Clinton administration so lets look back at a little history.

Enron, the once powerful energy trading corporation, is mired in financial ruin and scandal. Thousands of employees lost not only their jobs, but also their retirement accounts which were invested almost entirely in now worthless Enron stock. Others whose retirement accounts held stock in the once robust Fortune 10 company are also among those hit hard by the collapse. On Capitol Hill, it seems that just about everyone is scheduling hearings. Much of the nation and all of Washington, D.C. are agog that as much as $6 billion were lost.

All of this sounds pretty serious, but the reality is that the economic devastation could have been a lot worse. Here's how. A number of energy companies, including Enron, were strong supporters of the Kyoto Protocol (aka Global Warming Treaty) and international emissions trading. Enron and others believed that they would profit handsomely from the Clinton-Gore Administration's infatuation with the Kyoto treaty's command and control regulatory regime.

Enron envisioned itself being a key player in the new international trading system. It would make a percentage of every trade it transacted. Additionally, since the Kyoto Protocol would reduce and eventually close down coal-fired power plants and encourage the use of gas-fired plants, Enron saw another chance to profit since much of its business was in natural gas.

In 1997, the U.S. Senate unanimously voted to advise the Clinton-Gore administration that it should not enter into any agreement to ration energy or harm the US economy. It is extraordinarily rare that everyone in the Senate agrees on something. How often do Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Jesse Helms and Trent Lott all agree?

That same year -- 1997 -- Enron officials met with Clinton and Gore at the White House to promote the Kyoto Protocol and emissions trading.

When the negotiations over the global warming treaty were breaking down and it appeared as if no agreement would be reached, Al Gore flew to Japan to personally accede to whatever unreasonable demands were made. The terms he agreed to were worse than most had ever imagined. However, Enron and others who hoped to benefit from this new regulatory scheme were pleased. In fact, an Enron internal memo boasted that the Kyoto Protocol would "do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory initiative...."

Unfortunately, we live in an era in which many businesses hope to succeed not by producing better products or by being more efficient, but by getting government to impose special interest regulations designed to give them an advantage in the marketplace. The problem with this approach is that someone has to pay the cost. In the case of the Kyoto Protocol, the cost was to be imposed on every American. We would have had to pay more for everything from groceries, to fuel, to clothing, to heating and cooling.

If the Kyoto Protocol were ratified and in full force, experts estimate that Americans could lose between $100 billion and $400 billion -- each year. Additionally, between 1 and 3.5 million jobs could be lost. That means that each household could lose an average of up to $6,000 each year. That is a lot to ask of Americans so that large energy companies could profit from this regulatory scheme. Moreover, a cost of $400 billion annually makes Enron's current one-time loss of $6 billion look like pocket change.

The point is not to minimize the difficulty and economic pain that Enron's failure has caused -- but to highlight that if a one-time loss of $6 billion is worth worrying about, we should be that much more concerned about a loss of $400 billion each year. For the time being, we have avoided these catastrophic costs because the Clinton-Gore Administration was not successful in shoving the global warming treaty down our throats.

We should thank President Bush for steadfastly standing up to the special interests who promoted the Kyoto Treaty. Despite the wishes of those powerful few who hoped to profit from the new regulatory mandates of Kyoto, President Bush did not cave-in. Instead, Bush sided with hardworking Americans who simply could not afford to foot the bill so that a few special interests could profit handsomely.

There are others who continue to push the Kyoto Protocol and energy rationing schemes. They would like to run roughshod over President Bush, take our jobs, and pick our pockets. Beware. If they succeed, our economic pain will be a great deal more profound than anything experienced because of Enron's current financial collapse.

Frontiers of Freedom

[deuce91]

I had heard something similar.. The only reason Conoco was interested in "helping" was so that could be "in" on the discussion. That way they can protect their interests (selling oil) while looking like they care (joining the partnership). Kind of made a little sense to me.

[Bubba]

Originally Posted by Made in the USA

Explain your reasoning, Bubba??

The largest contributor to CO2 in the atmosphere is the oceans. As they heat up they give off CO2, when they cool they take in CO2. As the oceans are so huge they take quite awhile to heat up and release CO2. That is why the CO2 increase in the atmosphere lags behind the rise in temps. The post below has a very informative video from many highly qualified people that explains this and other misinformation that the media is promoting about global warming.

Originally Posted by Highwayman

I see the video I posted from Youtube isn’t there anymore, but it is still on Google.

[TigerEyes]

Originally Posted by Bubba

The largest contributor to CO2 in the atmosphere is the oceans.

Uhhh... last time I visited the ocean, it was flat, not carbonated.

[Made in the USA]

Two Thirds of our Oxygen in the atmosphere comes from the Ocean in the form of Algal respiration. The other Third comes from plants, trees, and the rain forests. I have never heard the theory you put forth on the CO2. For that much CO2 to be dissolved in an aqueous solution, the pH would have to be rather low!

[TigerEyes]

Originally Posted by Made in the USA

For that much CO2 to be dissolved in an aqueous solution, the pH would have to be rather low!

Ummm... how does CO2 affect the amount of H+ or OH- ions present in the water?

[Made in the USA]

Forms carbonic acid!!